Residential cardboard now banned at Kitimat landfill

Kitimat Council just passed a ban on residential cardboard at the landfill.

That means now you’ll have to send your packaging and cereal boxes to the KUTE recycling depot on Third Avenue in the Service Centre.

The motion, brought forward by councillor Mario Feldhoff, continues a trend of programs designed to increase the life of the landfill.

While noting a lot of people already use KUTE for their recycling, Feldhoff added that “Sadly, not everyone does.”

“It’s time to incrementally take things up when it comes to residentially-generated cardboard,” he said, noting it adds to other programs such as segregating metal, car batteries and tires at the landfill.

Phil Germuth supported the motion, while asking if KUTE could handle the additional cardboard traffic from the community. Mayor Joanne Monaghan said they could, and Feldhoff said that any potential issues is something to work out with KUTE as they come up.

“I’m sure we’ll hear about it if there are some challenges,” he said.

Mary Murphy was also in favour of the motion but added that she’d like to look at plans in the future to make the depot more accessible and user friendly.

“It’s not user friendly where it’s located and some people don’t have the ability to go down and drop off their cardboard,” said Murphy.

KUTE President Barb Hall told the Sentinel she does believe the depot has enough capacity for an increase in cardboard drop offs, saying that right now they send a shipment whenever they get enough to fill a truck.

“We just proabbly have to ship a little more often,” she said, noting that it’s hard to know how much extra cardboard this really means.

She’s happy with council’s direction on cardboard, even as news of the motion came as a surprise to her.

“If you walk around on garbage day for particular streets it’s amazing how much cardboard is in the garbage,” said Hall.

She said she hopes they ease the cardboard ban onto people and make it voluntary at first, just as the town did for businesses when they banned cardboard to the landfill from them.

As for their location, she said they have no plans to move and their location is keeping with the town plan. Challenges with centralized drop-off locations also means that’s unlikely.